"Niles Celebrity" - actor William Thorne - I am Batman!

From the 1946 Spanish language catalog

Who is the mystery man in the sombrero?

He is William L. Thorne, AKA "Uncle Bill" to the Roeding family, and part-time Niles resident.

William Thorne (1878-1948) was Elizabeth Thorne's brother.  That's George C. Roeding's wife, Elizabeth, and George C. Roeding Jr.'s "Uncle Bill."

Here are some scraps and bits from his life in an attempt to get the whole picture of his life. Always updated and fact-checked.

Victorian Gardens in the Washington Township

So what was a Victorian garden in the Washington Township? Where would they have gotten their plants? 

The mission gardens and orchards would have been a source of plant materials before the nurseries. E.J. Wickson wrote about the nurserymen in the 1850s to 1910. Until the first nurseries in the Washington Township, there were nurseries in San Jose. 

Luckily we had a local prolific writer, Charles Howard Shinn, who wrote about the old gardens of the area. He was editor for the California Horticulturalist and floral magazine for a couple of years (Check his wikipedia article for many more articles). 

The Shinn family had a nursery in the 1870s and 1880s and you can check out their "Shinn's Nurseries" catalog. They list the roses, ornamentals, and flowers that you could buy along with the fruit trees. They imported many plants from Japan.

Rock's Nurseries in San Jose was in business from 1865 to the late 1880s or 1890s. Pioneer nurseryman B.S. Fox was Rock's neighbor. (catalogs not online but available) Rock and his partners opened the California Nursery in 1884 and the California Nursery catalogs can be found online.